OWE’s Larry Townsend filed a lawsuit in San Francisco federal court on August 18 on behalf of Joan Bernard, a ex-employee of the online dating service Zoosk, who alleges that the company is misappropriating her right of publicity and seeking to register as a trademark her “Joan Actually” stage name and pen name that she created while a company spokesperson.
According to an article in Law360 on August 19, 2016, Ex-Worker Sues Zoosk for Trying to Trademark Her Persona, “Former Zoosk employee Joan Barnard said she created the persona ‘Joan Actually’ to work as a company spokesperson not long after she began working there in 2014 as a content strategist. After she was terminated from the company in January, Barnard asked the company to stop using the ‘Joan Actually’ persona — which the company partly complied with initially — but in April, Zoosk filed to register the persona as a trademark for entertainment purposes relating to dating and romance, Barnard said.”
The complaint relates that “Only after termination of plaintiff’s employment did defendant develop the strategy of appropriating plaintiff’s identity under the ruse that Joan Actually was not plaintiff but rather an impersonal and disembodied trademark, signifying only a ‘fictional character’ who walked, talked, looked and acted like plaintiff but somehow the public did not understand that person to be plaintiff.”
Ms. Barnard is asking that Zoosk be “permanently enjoined from using in any manner Plaintiff’s name (Joan Barnard, Joan Actually, or Joan) to advertise or promote Defendant’s goods or services” and that an order be entered declaring that “Joan Actually” is a stage name and pen name belonging to Ms. Barnard and cannot be used as a trademark of service mark without her express written consent.
The full complaint is available here. The case is Barnard v. Zoosk, case number 3:16-cv-04767, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.